See, there’s this thing called GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). You can read about it on the EU GDPR Information Portal or in a two part article Create If Writing site. Part 1 and Part 2. The articles are geared more toward us bloggers and website owners but it has great information about what the heck all this is about.
Basically it means I gotta tell you:
– my site (everything is based on WordPress) creates cookies and puts it/them in your browser when you visit
– to leave a comment, you have to provide your email address. However, comments are turned off throughout most of this website.
– I have YouTube videos of Quinn embedded in this website. YouTube will want to insert 3 cookies.
What happens with that information? Not a thing. Seriously.
– The website cookie sets it so the next time you visit, the site loads faster (or not).
– On posts and pages that allow comments, the email address is needed to stop spammers and frankly, I never look at them. No one else can either. I don’t sell them or use them without your consent. And not sure how I would use them anyway.
– I have no idea. It probably keeps your preferences for the videos you watch here.
Bottom line? This site collects data about you that is never used. This site does not have ads. Not even Google ads. I don’t link you to Facebook or make you sign in through them. You don’t have to sign in at all in order to read and/or comment.
If you don’t like the privacy issues, there are two options:
– leave this site, go into your browser’s cookies, delete the ones from this site, and never visit here again. And also clean out your browser’s cache. Done.
– don’t leave a comment
– Delete the cookies from YouTube.
But what if you WANT to visit this site and leave comments???
– Use a cookie management extension. I use Cookies AutoDelete with my Firefox.
– Comment away and feel safe that I do nothing with the data. Nothing. Not even sure where it is. Somewhere in the highly guarded, well maintained, untouchable SQL database, I’m sure.